Terror Incognita

by Jeffrey Thomas

  TERROR INCOGNITA

  Jeffrey Thomas

  First Digital Edition

  February 2010

  Darkside Digital

  A Horror Mall Company

  P.O. Box 338

  North Webster, IN 46555

  www.horror-mall.com/darksidedigital

  © 2010, 2000 by Jeffrey Thomas

  Cover Artwork © 2010, 2003 by Jamie Oberschlake

  All Rights Reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ADORATION

  The breasts I knew at midnight

  beat like the sea in me now.

  –Anne Sexton, “Dreaming the Breasts”

  Carpet of rain-slicked leaves, black and glossy as flesh swollen with rot, trees like fossilized lightning stabbed into the earth, tiny pallid mushrooms like the protruding fingers of buried infants, still-damp sky the same dismal gray as the clapboards of the dilapidated house the two men could see ahead through the last of the scarred trunks. They stole upon the structure from the rear as if afraid they might startle it into fleeing or disappearing. After all, it had the aura of a place that had long eluded discovery, that had been built out in this remote spot for the sake of concealment. An overgrown dirt road snaked away from its front, and must connect up with some road sooner or later, though for these men it had been easier to park their car and approach the house through a stretch of forest. McComis only half-fancifully wondered if that dirt road led off to even more secretive places, a whole town or even an entire looming city similarly gray, similarly hidden away from all but those few souls who found the way.

  They had seen no other houses along their stroll. They had heard no birds, the only sign of animal habitation being a high, strange chittering. Startled by its suddenness, McComis had looked above and around him for its owner.

  “Red squirrel,” Dore had explained. “They like to scold you.”

  But McComis had been doubtful. The sound had contained something of the insect in it, and yet also the suggestion of a human child’s voice.

  At the perimeter of the property there was a trace of ancient stone wall, half buried and the rest—like vertebrae jutting from the earth—smothered in lush plants, against which little white clusters of lilies-of-the-valley stood out. Those tiny, delicate bells had been McComis’ mother’s favorite flower; it grew in shadowed places.

  The two men stepped over the wall and into a tiny clearing filled by the house. It was utterly drained of color, slats fallen from its sides in places, holes gaping in its eaves where birds or squirrels—or whatever had made that angry sound—no doubt took refuge in the colder months, which were poised to descend seemingly at any moment.

  McComis followed Dore around to the front of the two-story house. Its windows were all blinded by shades like eyelids fallen in death...though McComis wondered at what might be peering at him around their frayed edges.

  They mounted a few steps, but before he knocked on the door, Dore opened the front of his expensive sports coat to show McComis the handle of the semi-automatic pistol tucked in his waistband, indenting his swollen belly. McComis had thought the man had more the look of a gangster than a businessman, and now that image was only heightened. Dore buttoned his coat again.

  “Just so you know I’m able to protect you. You won’t need me to protect you, so long as you stick to the rules we’ve discussed, but I just want to reassure you. Don’t be afraid, okay? I’m right here. Nothing’s going to happen to you...if you just stick to the program.”

  McComis nodded, and swallowed what felt like a sea urchin. “I understand.”

  Dore stared at him another moment, and then turned to rap on the door.

  It opened almost instantly, as if the opener had been on the other side listening to their exchange. And as the door swung inward, gray light fell on a shadowed face and McComis felt his already trotting heart surge forward as if to dash itself to death against his ribs.

  The man who stood in the doorway was dead, seemingly as long dead as the house itself, and in fact both looked as if they had never been alive. His flesh was not purplish but purple, purple and slick as that of an eggplant, except where it was torn or ulcerated, in which places it had a white crustiness. The eyes were so caked in bright yellow scabs that McComis wondered if the corpse had vision, or navigated by other senses. But its hair cut was fairly neat, and its suit was no less expensive that those of the two living men.

  The creature stepped back to permit their entrance. It didn’t stagger, didn’t seem sluggish in its movements. McComis would have preferred it to be less coordinated. Without a word to the thing, Dore moved past it, into the house’s interior. McComis followed swiftly, keeping his gaze straight ahead but shuddering as his sleeve brushed that of the dead man.

  In the short hallway, there was a staircase to the second floor. At its head was another dead man, of the same general appearance except that this one was obese, though whether he had been that way in life or if he was expanded with the gases of decomposition, McComis couldn’t guess. The corpse waved an arm indicating that they should mount the steps, and Dore did so. McComis trailed behind after darting a furtive look over his shoulder.

  There were no lights on in the house. No music or TV played. Still as a mausoleum, its atmosphere damp as that of a basement, the smell of mold strong from the brown, water-stained and sloughing wallpaper. Past the obese cadaver, the two visitors passed along another hallway, foregoing several closed doors in favor of the door at its end. There, a third dead man awaited them. This one, too, stepped aside to permit their entrance. But this time, Dore did not enter. He hung back, and McComis looked to him.

  “Go on,” Dore prompted him, even smiling. “This is what you paid for.”

  Yes...and he had paid a lot. But now he wasn’t so sure he wanted to see what his money had bought him. He wouldn’t ask for it back, or he was sure that Dore or the others wouldn’t let him leave alive (and then would he himself become a fourth “body” guard?). He would let Dore keep the money. He just didn’t think he could go through with this...

  But the door was already open. Dore waited expectantly. Stick to the program, Dore had warned him. Wheels were already in motion.

  McComis stepped through the threshold. The door snicked shut discreetly behind him.

  There was a large bed at the center of the small room, a bed that loomed like a planet with an atmosphere of sickly sweet perfume, somewhat musty like the petals of dying roses. And in this expanse, this vastness of bed, in a shimmer of silk nightgown, reclined Marilyn Monroe.

  Her flesh was not purple, festered with sores. It was creamy-smooth and softly luminous as if it were filmed through a smear of Vaseline, to soften the effects of age. But it was not a glowing ghost he saw. Her toenails were actually painted. Her full, voluptuous body physically depressed the mattress. Her eyes were not crusted in yellow pus, but shone at McComis, narrowed in a smile.

  “Hi, honey,” she breathed. She ran her hand across the mattress in little circles. “Come on in...don’t be shy.” That trademark, wispy little girl voice.

  McComis had had a crush on Marilyn Monroe from childhood. She might have been his first of many celebrity crushes, and though he had other favorites now, Marilyn was the ultimate celebrity, wasn’t she? An icon. A goddess. Immortal...

  And yet, for all her beauty, he feared her more than the dead men. They, at least, were honest about their condition. And he had never intended to touch the dead men. But he was here to touch the flesh of this woman. To press his lips to it. To enter the most vuln
erable part of him into it...inside it. Might the decay, the wretchedness be lurking deviously within? And yet how could she appear so healthy, so alive, on the outside if the fruit were rotten at its core?

  She patted the mattress. “Come on, baby...I won’t bite.” She giggled. “Unless you want me to.” And as she shifted, a strap of her nightgown slipped off the smooth roundness of her shoulder.

  McComis again nearly choked on a barbed, dried ball of saliva. But he took one step further into the room. He had been resting his back against the closed door for support. Now, free of it, he felt like he might totter and fall...and he seemed to stagger toward the bed against his will, drawn by the planet’s gravity. And Marilyn slid over to make room for him, still smiling. The idol of millions for decades, but it was him she wanted. Him...

  Still staggering those few steps to the great bed, he saw her slip her nightgown up over her head. Nipples pink as if flushed with living blood. Nipples pink against lush white flesh like rose petals fallen on the marble of a gravestone.

  But she was not cold, like stone, when he touched her at last. Warm...soft...so warm and soft...

  * * *

  “Well?” Dore asked, still smiling. Had he been smiling all the while, these past few hours? Lingering outside the door with the dead man, both of them listening?

  McComis didn’t tell him how it had been. “Let’s go,” he murmured. But as he started ahead of Dore down the hall, his back to the other man, he said, “I’ll be back next week.”

  “Marilyn again?”

  “No,” McComis said quietly, as if she might hear him and be hurt, though he wasn’t sure she was even in that room any more. In the house any more. Had she already been returned to wherever it was she had been summoned or conjured from?

  “Lady Di? Selena?” Dore brought forth their names with a hint of enthusiasm that suggested he had enjoyed the products of this place himself.

  The idea of calling up such recently deceased celebrities nauseated McComis for some reason. It made them too real, whereas Marilyn was almost the stuff of myth; harder to imagine she had ever been a real, living person, a child, a corpse.

  “No,” he said. “Maybe Grace Kelly. Maybe Carole Lombard.” More goddesses. More myths.

  “Those old movie broads were too chubby for my tastes,” opined the paunchy Dore. He lit a cigarette as they descended the stairs.

  Outside, it had begun to drizzle again, but McComis welcomed the open air, despite the moldering of the leaves beneath their feet. At least it cleared his head of the delirious scent of rose petals. He only wished Dore would quicken his pace through the forest, before they became lost out here when night fell, which must be imminent.

  “How did you find this place?” McComis asked him while they walked.

  “I can’t tell you stuff like that. Look...I didn’t find it; it was shown to me. I have a boss I answer to, like I told you before. Someone like you. Someone with money. Somebody who could have anything he wanted. In other words, somebody really bored. I think he might have made the place, somehow. Or I mean, made it into the place that it is. With enough money, you can make anything happen, if you hook up with the right people with the right knowledge. I don’t know much more than you, and I can’t tell you any more about the man I work for.”

  “Does anyone besides me and him come here?”

  “There are a few other clients.”

  “Who do they ask for?”

  “Marilyn has been called before,” he said, grinning over at McComis as if he thought he might be jealous. “But not just movie stars. One guy wanted Joan of Arc, and Cleopatra, but they wouldn’t come. Either they’re too long gone, or it has to be someone whose image is really clear in your mind, like a rock star or a TV celebrity. One guy calls up male actors. James Dean. Elvis Presley. Elvis looked great. I saw him. And they never refuse. They always act like they want it. Elvis would’ve kicked the shit out of this guy if he tried that stuff when he was alive, but dead folk don’t say no.”

  “In life, they had all that adoration,” McComis mused aloud.

  “Yeah, that could be it. They miss that. Maybe they need it, to stay alive in our minds. I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s even really them, or a kind of recording. A videotape. But they’re flesh, you know that.”

  McComis didn’t respond. But yes, he knew that. He had ultimately kissed Marilyn passionately, his tongue in her mouth, her mouth moist with saliva inside. So moist inside...

  * * *

  He rented a video with Marilyn Monroe, but after fifteen minutes he had to turn it off.

  Alone in his house, watching the movie, it had frightened him too much, as if it had been those three animated dead men he’d seen captured on celluloid.

  Alone in his house—yes. He had been divorced for three years now. His wife had since remarried. A pretty woman; he doubted she would have married a plain-looking man like himself in the first place, had it not been for his money. He had never been good with dating. He experienced romance vicariously, in film. But then, didn’t most people? Did anyone’s life approach the glamour of fabrication?

  It was his mother, he felt, who had inspired his love of movies, particularly older movies. Bette Davis had been her favorite actress. Watching these women always brought his mother to the front of his mind, as if she were the actual star of each film; their immortality lent her a wispy immortality, too. She had been a pretty woman herself; photos of the poet Anne Sexton put him in mind of his mother. The lean tapered face, the dark hair, the pale intelligent eyes.

  His mother had passed away, from breast cancer, when McComis was twelve years old.

  Thinking of her now, he wanted to go dig out his scrapbooks, filled with photos of her. But instead, he stared at the blank television screen with a slowly mounting intensity...as if he expected to suddenly hear the tape machine begin to whir again, and it would be his mother’s face he would see on the screen, once again alive.

  * * *

  “She’s waiting for you,” said Dore. Smiling.

  McComis locked his eyes with the man for several beats. Dore began digging for a cigarette, breaking their gaze. McComis then turned and let himself into the bedroom.

  A woman stood silhouetted at the window, peeking out secretly around the torn shade. At his entrance, she turned. Her slender frame was draped in a light, flowered summer dress. Dark hair, limned in the light from the window in a nearly extinguished corona.

  “Oh, honey,” the woman cooed, stepping away from the window. “Oh, Tom...baby...how I’ve missed you.” She held open her arms to him. “How I’ve missed you, all these years.”

  And he found himself staggering to her, again drawn as if against his conscious will, but some part of him obviously anxious, desperate, in need. McComis fell into the youthful arms of his mother, dead for these many years but not aged a day since he’d last seen her. And he crushed her in his arms, as hers went around him. It was the smell of her familiar lily-of-the-valley perfume, ultimately, that made him cry.

  “I’ve missed you, too,” he sobbed in her hair, against her slim throat. “I’ve missed you, too.” He bucked hard with his sobs, and she kissed his neck to soothe him, ran her hands across his back.

  “Shh, it’s all right now, darling,” she whispered. “We’re together now.”

  “I think about you all the time...but I never dreamed I could see you again...I never dreamed...”

  “I know,” she sighed. “We need each other, don’t we? I’ve dreamed of you, too. I can still remember holding you as a baby in my arms. Breast-feeding you. And now...at last...here we are again. You in my arms.” She gently pushed him out of their embrace, her hands running tenderly down his chest. She unfastened the one button that held his jacket closed, and began to slip it off his shoulders. “We don’t have to be alone any more...”

  McComis took hold of her thin wrists, held them away from him. “What are you doing?” he rasped.

  His mother, now shorter than he was—yes,
even a few years younger than he was—smiled up at him. “Don’t worry, honey,” she giggled softly. “I won’t bite you. Not unless you want me to...”

  McComis shoved the woman away from him. She almost fell, grabbed the footboard of the bed for support. He, in turn, backed away from her...against the door...

  “You aren’t my mother!” he cried.

  “Of course I am, Tom!” She still smiled, despite his violence, her pale eyes hungry. Hungry for his love.

  “My mother wouldn’t do that! And I never loved my mother like that!”

  “Every woman a man loves is really his mother, Tom.”

  McComis whirled around to grapple with the doorknob.

  “What are you doing?” his mother demanded, floating suddenly toward him. “Wait!”

  He finally got the knob turned—he mustn’t let her touch him—and was out through the door, slamming it in her face. He heard her slight but solid body thud against it, heard her pound the heels of her fists against it.

  “Tom!” she wailed. “Come back! Please—I need you!”

  “What’s wrong?” Dore asked, alarmed, straightening up warily. The dead man, as well, swivelled about to face him.

  But McComis plunged between them, bolted down the hall.

  “Isn’t that what you wanted?” Dore asked, trailing after him.

  * * *

  This time, McComis made his way to the house in the woods without his escort. He knew the secret, unmarked path through the forest by now. Dore wasn’t even aware of this excursion.

  In each hand, McComis slung a heavy red container filled with gasoline. In one pocket was a tin of lighter fluid, in the other a disposable lighter. And in his own waistband, a semi-automatic handgun.

  He saw it, through the trees, gray beneath a gray sky. Just before he entered the clearing, he heard that chittering scolding sound again. An alarm, a warning? He expected to see one of the sentries come around the edge of the house then...but none did. Still, he mustn’t take any chances. He worked swiftly, uncapping the first container and splashing the outside of the house, working his way entirely around it.